I now have a frame that will stand up on its own.

I got this Mendel Prusa RepRap kit from MakerGear a month ago but I just finally started working on it last night. I’m going to try to get it working before Heart Rhythm so I can hand out little printed heart models.

The Heart Rhythm Society has an interesting podcast, wherein the author of an article in each issue is interviewed, often by Dr. Doug Zipes. I tried to sign up for it here, but it only gives directions for subscribing with iTunes. I don’t care for iTunes these days, so I went about finding the real RSS feed for the podcast.

If you want it, here it is:

http://podcasts.elsevierhealth.com/HRTHM/hrthm_rss.xml

Hopefully the webmaster at HRS will wise up and post this link as well. Enjoy!

After hours of banging my head against the wall, I have finally got my bluetooth headset working with my SIP accounts in Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

Assuming bluetooth is already working, and you’ve paired your headsets, do the following things:

1. Download the x-lite 4.0 software for Linux
2. Run the softphone with ‘padsp xtensoftphone’ (this will wrap it’s audio i/o with pulseaudio
3. Change the audio settings in the x-lite phone to use the PulseAudio virtual device
4. Make sounds in the x-lite phone, call an 800 number or something, then while sound is being made run ‘pavucontrol’
5. In the output and recording tabs, find the padsp streams and select the bluetooth headset inputs/outputs.

Caveats: I haven’t tested whether this is remembered between logins, and I think if you are using padsp to wrap other applications this will send them all through bluetooth.

Let me know if this helps you or if you get stuck!

I have a couple of businesses, plus my own personal transactions, and every year come January I have to make sure I have all of the appropriate financial documentation for them, including copies of invoices and receipts. Fortunately, most of my invoices and receipts are now in email form, though I still get some paper ones (which go straight into the ScanSnap). Unfortunately, emails and attachments can’t go nicely in a reference folder in my Dropbox.

Thunderbird to the rescue!

I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email for mostly the same reason I still use FireFox to browse the web: there’s a plugin for almost anything I want to do. Also, in Linux it’s easy to use a CUPS-PDF virtual printer to print to PDF. Combining this with the attachment extractor Thunderbird plugin allows me to dump all of the attachments and emails to files on my hard drive in just a few clicks.

I have ‘Invoices’ and ‘Receipts’ email folders that need to be dumped, so I just go into each folder, select all messages, print them using CUPS-PDF, and then right-click and tell AttachmentExtractor to dump any attachments as well. Done, in about 5 minutes. Trying to do this manually would take countless hours, meaning in reality that I would just never do it, and if my taxes were audited, it would be a total nightmare.

Hopefully if you have this same problem google + this post will help you out. Enjoy!